


a [semi] spectacular love story

by asiren (meliorismo)



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, M/M, Russian Translation Available, Slice of Life, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-20 19:44:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14900795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meliorismo/pseuds/asiren
Summary: Kyungsoo has two phobias, a steady job and a lonely cactus. Baekhyun is dubious, cheerful and the Spider-Man (full-time). Together they try to make it work, every single day, with changing degrees of success.





	a [semi] spectacular love story

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt #378**  
>  **Pairing:** Baekhyun/Kyungsoo  
>  **Rating:** T  
>  **Warnings:** Very minor, very brief implied mention of a panic attack.  
>  **Author’s Note:** as always, a huge thank you to verena, faby and everyone in my twitter timeline. y'all keep me going.
> 
> [russian translation ](https://ficbook.net/readfic/7103642)by blanche_neige. thank you!!

It was almost 5PM when the bumping started again. Kyungsoo sighed, turning the page of his book with more force than strictly necessary — he’d thought that it wouldn’t happen that day, since the morning was quiet and so was most of the afternoon, but he should have known better than hope. It was the third consecutive week that the new guy at 321 was making a fuss.

Kyungsoo was indulgent at the beginning. He thought it was just someone trying to settle, moving furniture around, maybe changing something or another that needed industrial tools. His goodness of heart, though, ran out of steam during the second Monday. What was that idiot doing, anyway? Why was he so _loud_?

The unmistakable sound of a window breaking almost sounded inside Kyungsoo’s head. He thought, then, _That’s it. That’s fucking it_ , aggressively holding his phone, decided to go down the hall and fill a complaint. That was just too much. He wasn’t obligated to be the silent partner-in-crime of the 321 asshole; someone should sell him out to the administration.

Kyungsoo longed for his days of silence, when the only annoying noise was his elder neighbor, Mrs. Kang, who would be trying to play piano like when she was young. Unfortunately, though, she was already 85, and her hands weren’t as they used to be, so the sound was quite terrible.

He went down the corridor, angrily pressing the dreadful elevator button; it took its time, almost three minutes, since the last place it stopped was at the eleventh floor and everything in the building was dead or dying. During this time, Kyungsoo started to calm down — why would he go down the hall to yell at someone, or call the landlady to tell her exactly what he thought of her desire of making money at all costs, without checking the tenants properly, just throwing them around without regard to Kyungsoo’s happiness and well-being? Nothing would change, anyway; it was a really lose-lose scenario. So he sighed, went back to his apartment, picked up his book — Good Omens — and started the page from the beginning, since he didn’t remember a thing about it.

At the 321, the noise stopped, as if the idiot himself was feeling guilty about all the emotional stress that he was making Kyungsoo go through. It was just wishful thinking, though; someone as inconsiderate would never think about his neighbors. Even so, Kyungsoo didn’t know much about the guy. He helped him a little while he was moving, with some boxes and whatever, trying to project a _welcoming aura_ (Kyungsoo’s sister was really into that mystical stuff at the time and he was starting to buy some of her talk); everyone was excited to meet him, since nobody ever moved away from their building, and the only way to an apartment be vacant was if someone died. In fact, Mr. Lee at the 321! Just that week he had a stroke, leaving behind nothing but a fat cat, so the talking was about who would be the new tenant, and if they were handsome (as was Ms. Kim’s worries), polite (Mrs. Hwang’s) or quiet (Kyungsoo’s).

When he finally arrived, Byun Baekhyun was 1) very handsome (and so Ms. Kim started to plan their wedding), 2) extremely polite (winning everyone’s approval) and 3) fucking, terrible-y, horrible-y, insufferable-y _loud._ So, yeah. It looked like everyone was really happy — literally everyone but Kyungsoo.  

So was life.

Anyway, Kyungsoo helped him move some boxes, and gave some tips about the shower (which was temperamental, since nobody updated anything in their building, even when it straight-up died), and suggested a store down the block that sold towels and stuff — since he didn’t look like he had any —, nodded decisively at the apartment as a whole and then left him there to adjust. All in all, a pretty good grade at the Nice Neighbor Guide. Baekhyun should be fucking _glad._

Three weeks later and Kyungsoo was lighting candles to Mr. Lee’s ghost, trying to talk him into haunting Baekhyun and the dull, orange 321. Maybe if the story went out that it was the home of a terrible ghost, then nobody would ever want to get close to it.  

Baekhyun dropped another glass-related thing, swearing a little. Kyungsoo thought, a little viciously, _Good. Maybe it will hurt his feet and he’ll bleed to death._

With a better humor already, he went back to his reading; he realized, then, that he knew all the words, because he was trying to read that stupid book for two hours already without changing the page.

 

* * *

 

Kyungsoo never really liked small spaces, but crowds were the worst. He had this memory, when he was four or maybe six, and he was lost and confused on an amusement park. People walked around him, fast and busy with their own lives and their own children; it was so overwhelming that for a second it was almost like they were _through_ instead of _by._

He avoided the elevator at all costs, using the same amount of determination someone could do to run away from the devil himself. It was, honestly, like that rectangular-shaped _thing_ was the beginning of everything truly evil in this world. It wasn’t that much trouble as his friends used to imply, since he lived on the 221 — second floor, his windows like spider webs made of iron, resting hard and silver against the sun.  

He was afraid of heights.

There was this one day, though, that he couldn’t take the stairs as usual. It was a physical impossibility — he was drowning on a thousand boxes, all full of clothing and toys to donation. Kyungsoo was always busy with things like that, since he worked full-time on a NGO involved with orphanages and aiming to help single mothers. There wasn’t a single day that someone wouldn’t find him sewing an onesie.

Kyungsoo was so worried about the problems of the day, already haunted by the image of himself having to pick everything up from the ground because he couldn’t stop any of it from falling… He only looked at anything at all that wasn’t the dull wallpaper covering two of the four walls (the others being the door and a mirror) when someone coughed very loudly.

It was, of course, Baekhyun. He was handsome and brighter than the sun, with something weirdly hopeful about his face; it was, probably, his cheeks (sharp) or his eyes (restless). Either way, Kyungsoo could look at him and think with clear objectivity _: He’s pretty, of course_ , _but not really my type._

“You’re the guy on 221, right? We are kind of neighbours.” Baekhyun started, sounding cheerfully and looking like someone who was trying very hard to stay silent about some secret or another. Kyungsoo, though, couldn’t care less. What he knew about Baekhyun — pretty, dubious _, noisy —_ wasn’t enough to inspire on him any confidence or good will. Unfortunately, he couldn’t refuse to answer something that was so clearly meant to him. Kyungsoo had what someone could call a messed up personality, but he wasn’t deliberately _mean_. He was just…

Well.

Quiet, you know?

“Yes,” he settled for saying, “I remember you from when you moved. There was excitement all around; everyone was happy in meeting you.”

“Oh?” Baekhyun looked a lot like a lost puppy, the ones who follow you around so you would feel some misplaced sense of guilt and take them in. (He was better at it than the guy on the sixth floor, Park Chanyeol). Kyungsoo had to bravely resist the sudden urge of patting him on the shoulder.  

“No one ever moves away from here. Rent is too cheap, people too broke; anyway, we don’t have new people here in ages. Someone has to die for it to happen.”

“I guess it’s a little sad.”

“Nah. Everyone dies of old age, maybe. There was this guy, though; stabbed on his apartment a few years back.”

“Who did it?”

“Who knows.”

Baekhyun nodded, wisely. “There’s a lot of history here, then?”

“Well, yes. This building is standing since the end of the Joseon dynasty.”

The doors opened with a loud noise (since the elevator was as old as the complex itself), and Kyungsoo lifted his boxes and went after his car, leaving behind Byun Baekhyun and their shared conversation — forgetting, mostly, all about it; burying everything with the sand on the ground.

(It was a small step, almost inconsequential; someone could write it off as entirely casual. But it was, as things often are, a small beginning — while not really meaningful or glamourous, it was at least theirs, in a way, and _theirs_ (the secrets) in another).

 

* * *

 

“Are you aware”, Kyungsoo asked to wide awake Baekhyun, who blinked at him as if he had drank nothing but coffee since morning and were surviving on sheer will alone, “that it’s exactly three AM?”

“Uh?”

“This noise you’re doing. Why are you so loud?”

“I’m sorry”, he answered, looking appropriately ashamed. “I didn’t realize that it would wake you.”

“I live in the apartment right below yours.” Kyungsoo pointed, unwilling to feel charitable when he had the amazing total of four hours of sleep and wouldn’t go back to bed. He was these kind of people who can’t rest again after getting up for more than a short walk to the bathroom; which meant that he would be like a zombie at work, being forced to answer inconvenient questions like _so, you finally got a boyfriend, eh?_

(The answer was always a solid no. They won’t stop their crusade, though. Kyungsoo figured that they felt sorry for him, even if he was doing alright with life as it was).

“I don’t really have a notion of noise…” Baekhyun told him, very low as if a secret. “So I can’t tell when I’m being too loud.”

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s the truth!”

“Just please stop with the throwing stuff at the walls. Don’t you have any kind of regard for the things you bought? If so then why spent so much money buying everything?”

“That’s not fair”, he pointed out, sounding somehow steely. It was the first time that he heard that tone coming out of Baekhyun’s mouth, since he was always noisy and nice, so it made Kyungsoo stop a little, which surprised Baekhyun even more than it did to him. “I’m moving furniture around, that’s all.”

“Again? You move them everyday! And why do it in the middle of the night?”

“I work during the day.”

“Shouldn’t you be asleep, then?”

“I’m tired.”

“So you really shouldn’t be moving your stuff around the apartment, as if you’re some kind of maniac or whatever.”

“I resent that.” Baekhyun told him.

“Well, I mean it. Please stop it and, I don’t know, go to bed. I’m exhausted and you wouldn’t know quiet if it bites you in the ass.”  

“Good night, Kyungsoo.” Baekhyun said to his back; Kyungsoo just waved his hand like saying _yeah yeah bye bye._ He closed the door behind him with a bang (it was very heavy and Kyungsoo very tired), going down to the first floor one step at a time, and realized — with a sudden clarity — that Baekhyun had watched him go, intently, as if for some reason or another he was worried about him.

Uh.

Well.

_(What a weird thought,_ he sighed before deliberately forgetting everything about it, like everyone with a serious tendency to running and also avoiding would do).

 

* * *

 

“Well,” said the stranger, creeping behind Kyungsoo like some kind of monster or criminal or both. “We really should stop meeting like this.”

“How?” Kyungsoo asked him, locking the screen of his phone and turning to glare at Baekhyun, who looked way too pleased with himself, like the cat who got the canary. Kyungsoo was immediately flooded with suspicion. “Oh, no. What did you do?”

“Nothing!” Baekhyun squawked. And it really was a squawk, there wasn’t another word in the entire language that could describe this one sound. “Jesus, you think _terribly_ of me.”

Kyungsoo wanted to say _, I don’t think anything at all, because I don’t know you. A handful of encounters and you still don’t inspire in me any reason to stay._ He could also tell, and it would’ve been the truth, _There’s something wrong with you and I can’t figure out what is it…_

“I’m only asking because it was like you were throwing a very wild party on your apartment last night.”

“Did the noise keep you up?” Baekhyun, at least, looked appropriately guilty.

Kyungsoo chose to have mercy upon him. “Just for a little while. You shouldn’t do that again, though. What is so important that can’t wait until morning?”

“Just some stuff.” he gestured, vaguely. Baekhyun was a dancer, or a musician, or an actor — Kyungsoo used to know, during that first weeks, but he let go of that information soon after. He regretted it, though, because he wished that he could point exactly _why_ and _how_ and _when_ on the mystery of Baekhyun’s elegance and messy grace.

“Don’t you ever get compainings about all the yelling?”

“Once or twice,” Baekhyun said, looking very amused. “Mostly yours; the landlady told me all about your late night calls. Also, there is no yelling.”

“Screaming, then. Very noisy,” Kyungsoo answered, feeling zero shame. “Sometimes I do think that you ended up sneaking fifty people into your apartment and is doing God knows what.”

“What could we possibly be doing, me and all those imaginary people?”

“Well, how should _I_ know something about this? Maybe sex. Playing music, dancing. I don’t know. A lot of sex?”

“You have a weird mind.” Baekhyun informed Kyungsoo, who just shrugged. “There’s nothing going on, and surely isn’t this sexual as you seem to think.”

“Whatever.”

“Hey.”

“Uh?” Kyungsoo blinked. He thought that the conversation was over — he should, obviously, have known better. Baekhyun looked electrical, as always, like something was trying to talk him into start running.

“We should grab a coffee. And, uh. Croissants.”

“I like croissants.” Kyungsoo added, helpfully.

“Do you want to go?”

“What, _now?_ It’s midday!”

“We should go now,” Baekhyun told him, “because you’ll probably change your mind very soon.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Well, will you? I know that you think I’m noisy and annoying, but it’s just coffee.”

“Friends coffee or more than friends croissants?” Kyungsoo asked him, suspiciously.

“Friends coffee.” Baekhyun waved his hand at Kyungsoo like a child. “Pinky promise.”

“It isn’t a real thing.”

“Pinky promise.” he repeated, waving his finger at him like a child.

Kyungsoo sighed, exhausted with the whole ordeal. “Fine,” he ended up saying, “friends coffee sounds nice.”

After that, they went to this place that didn’t really sell breakfast stuff — everything was overpriced and there wasn’t a single chair unoccupied. They ate standing the way they arrived, making small talk between bites and a big mess with the food.

Kyungsoo had a lot of fun, actually, because wonders never really cease.

(Then he thought, almost absently, _it would be so easy_ _to somewhere in the immediate future fall in love with those kind of patterns…_ — it scared the shit out of him) _._

 

* * *

 

Two nights after that, Kyungsoo was going up the stairs, one step after the other, because the space was so small, the walls so close, it made him feel really uneasy. It was better, though, than the elevator, that was a thousand years old and sometimes didn’t open its door, and you had to stay there for two hours until someone could finally get you out. The buttons always flashed red, as if an omen. Kyungsoo hated everything about it.

_It’s mostly fine,_ he liked to think to himself. _Because my apartment is 221, at the second floor, and the stairs don’t have any cockroaches (which I also hate)._  It was a short trek, alone in the dark with only the emergency green lights as company. Sometimes he could hear a door or another slamming shut, likely refusing and protesting Kyunsoo’s very existence. He didn’t like to think about stuff like that. It was what his therapist called “a very unhealthy way of approaching life”. She was the professional, so he believed her and tried to stop. But it was hard. It was very, very hard.

When he was a child, there was this time when he almost fell down a tree. It was full of red apples, at somewhere that he didn’t really know where it was. His mother helped him go down, saying soothing nothings. It was only then that he realized that there were tears on his face. He wasn’t a loud crier, and he didn’t like audience — so he stopped, as if nothing had ever happened.

He didn’t know why he was remembering it.

When he got at the door, his hand already closed around the knob, he heard this sound — muffled but undeniably there — and chose to looked behind him. He was breathless, afraid of what he was going to see lurking on the semi-darkness of those stairs, lightened only by the ghostly quality of these green lines.

It was, of course, Baekhyun.

Who else?

“Are you alright?” he asked, trying really hard to ignore the blur of red and black or the Spiderman symbol on Baekhyun’s chest. He looked upset. Kyungsoo could relate.

“Sorry”, he murmured, and Kyungsoo knew that he was in some kind of pain. “I didn’t want to startle you.”

“You didn’t. What happened?”

Baekhyun didn’t answer that.

“Why are you here? And not, you know, your bed.”

“Too tired”, he said, “I don’t think I can get there.”

Kyungsoo sighed, exhausted. He hadn’t even doing what he was planning to do and he was already regretting it. “Do you want my help? I could take you to my apartment, but then you’d have to face the stairs.”

“I can’t do that.” Baekhyun added, helpfully.

“Yeah, yeah”, he muttered, going to Baekhyun, the corridor looking considerably smaller with two people so crowded against each other. In a pure spatial way. “Let’s go, crazy person. You’re going to catch your death if you stay here with this whatever that you’re calling clothes today.”

“It’s not what it looks like…”

“Shut up, you can’t even talk. Too late to defend yourself.”

“Kyungsoo?”

“Uh,” he muttered, trying to open the door while kind of supporting Baekhyun’s whole body against his back. “What is it?”

“Thank you”, he said, resting his face on Kyungsoo’s very neon-yellow shirt. “I’m sorry for being such a bother.”

“You aren’t”, he lied, “I’m happy to help.”

When he finally got Baekhyun lying on the weird stamped couch, the mask that he was holding to dear life resting safely on the table, Kyungsoo thought _What am I doing here._

“I’m going now”, he told the sleeping figure of Baekhyun, “try to not get yourself killed while I’m gone.”

(Baekhyun, of course, didn’t answer him. But even if he _was_ awake, he still wouldn’t say anything at all.

That was a vigilante’s life).

 

* * *

 

Things went on as before for three weeks. Baekhyun seemed to be happy pretending that nothing ever happened, and Kyungsoo was just glad to let him have that. It was mostly because he didn’t know what to say. If he was a responsible human, then he would start a rant about how dangerous everything that Baekhyun was doing could be. But they weren’t really friends, so he couldn’t say that. He thought about just hinting that he _knew_ , so the responsibility of starting this conversation wouldn’t be _his_ , but he didn’t do that either.

That’s why three weeks went on as before.

Kyungsoo was kind of a coward. He always knew that. What was getting under his skin, though, was that Spiderman _shouldn’t_ be — he spent all his free time fighting crime all night on the poorly illuminated streets. He shouldn’t, then, be scared of checking if a neighbor wasn’t going to hand him over to the cops. He should just be very straightforward about it, so that Kyungsoo would finally move on as it was the wise choice.

(He was always very mindful of the right thing to do).

But Baekhyun didn’t say _anything,_ silent as a gargoyle.

That’s why they went on as before.

 

* * *

 

They were in this fast food, nothing fancy about it at all. One of those that are really sad, something underappreciated about them; Kyungsoo could relate. That’s where he wanted to go when Baekhyun stopped him at the sidewalk saying that he wanted to eat something, couldn’t you come with me?

Kyungsoo said yes.

Why wouldn’t he?

“So,” Baekhyun started, very quietly between the loud sounds that he was making while sucking the straw. It was milkshake— strawberry —; Baekhyun said that it was going to be his lunch. Kyungsoo wanted to say something about it, anything, but he didn’t. And then it was too late to tell him anyway. Kyungsoo hated it about himself. It’s like he got frozen under the surface of this lake, the ice biting against his hands while he tried to break free. His therapist told him that it was “anxiety”. Like all the other words that she said, he tried to listen to it and change his behavior. But it was really hard. “What were you doing?”

“What?” Kyungsoo blinked at him, slowly. He was really tired because of something that happened at work. He couldn’t really remember what; only the feeling of helplessness. It must have been about one of the women that they tried to help. Sometimes they just met them too late to do anything.

“What were you doing? I mean, I saw you on the sidewalk. Were you coming back from work?”

“Yeah”, he told Baekhyun, almost absently. “I left earlier.”

“What do you do?”

“It’s an NGO. We try to help single mothers.”

“Sounds like an amazing goal to have.”

“You could think that”, he answered, using a fried potato to point at him, “but sometimes I just want to quit. Never come back. Just leave.”

“Why?”

“It can be really hard, and it’s not good enough. We help Susan, but we can’t take Mary in… And their children, of course. We aren’t really a shelter but we try our best.”

“This kind of work — it’s incredibly nice. Like, for real. I think that it’s admirable.”

“What do _you_ do, anyway?”

“I work at a library!” Baekhyun told him, sounding really excited. “I usually hang around the shelves with comics and children’s book. I’m always, like, helping a child or a mom to find the perfect book. And my boss, her name is Angelica, she is _real_ nice. She lets me get away with reading at work all the time.”

“Sounds fun.”

“It is! You should come sometime. I can find a book for you.”

“I will think about it”, Kyungsoo answered, and he couldn’t determine if he was lying or telling the truth. It made him uncomfortable. “We should go back; it’s getting late.”

_And you have things to do_ , Kyungsoo could have said. _Vigilante stuff. Spiderman._ In the end, though, he didn’t. He left Baekhyun in the stairs, and headed home. That night, when he heard the sound of something breaking, a table or a vase, he just turned to his side and went back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

Kyungsoo heard the knock at the glass of his window before he could fully process what was happening. He went there, ready to hit someone in the head and make a run for it, but it was only Baekhyun, leaning against the bronze handrail of the fire exit.

“This place if for emergencies, don’t you know that?”

Baekhyun knocked again, insistently. Kyungsoo didn’t want to open it for him, because then he would think that it’s okay to just show up uninvited and annoy everyone until he won over them by tiredness alone. But Baekhyun knocked again, and he was looking like such a puppy, hopeful and a little wet with the rain that didn’t really stop. He opened the window in the end, and Baekhyun was suddenly standing there, in Kyungsoo’s mismatched living room.

It was a weird situation.

“Do you want a cup of tea? Or coffee?” he asked, awkwardly. Baekhyun, God bless him, was too busy staring at the books in the shelves to notice small things like that.

“Tea. Coffee is way too—“

“Strong.” Kyungsoo finished for him.

“Yeah. Way too strong.”

He disappeared into the kitchen, glad to have a safe space to freak out. He did it while preparing the tea, and putting on mugs, and sweeting with honey. He did it while he breathed the steam of the water that he had left boiling for this reason — it was an old trick of his to deal with anxiety. When he went back with the tea, less than seven minutes after his exit, everything was under control again.

“What are you doing here?” Kyungsoo asked, handing Baekhyun his mug. It was strawberry like the milkshake. It was a safe bet, that he would like fruity tea. It was almost always overwhelming, like him.

Baekhyun, at least, didn’t bother with pretending. “I had a rough night. Coming here sounded like a better idea than to go straight home.”

“Why?”

“I wanted some warmth”, he said, after a while. “Like this tea that you made for me.”

“Was it this bad?” Kyungsoo asked, softer than before.

“Yeah.” Baekhyun told him, and then stayed there, in silence, for forty minutes.

When he finally left to go to his own bed Kyungsoo was surprised to realize that he already missed him.

 

* * *

There was this time when Baekhyun tried to save a cup from its death just grabbing it with _webs_ like a _random spider._ Kyungsoo had to kind of throw a spoon to the other side of the diner, hoping that it would be enough of a distraction while Baekhyun put the cup back on their table, looking a little flustered. Kyungsoo thought, then, _Good. You should be ashamed of the shit you got me through._

That was the first time that Kyungsoo realized that he was way out of his depth.

 

* * *

 

They kissed in June.

The weather was terrible; it looked like it wouldn’t ever stop raining. And it was such a chilly one! Someone could take that as an omen— a bad one. But Kyungsoo, of course, wasn’t superstitious and neither was Baekhyun. Because of that, they kissed in June, and not in July or August.

Kyungsoo had kissed — slept with — a lot of people over the years. He almost was engaged once, to a girl named Hye-won, who was the daughter of Kyungsoo’s mother’s childhood friend. She thought that it was a great way to unify the family, and Hye-won’s mom was all in. Kyungsoo believed that it was really for the best for a very long time. He even bought her a ring — it was pretty, made with white gold. Everyone said that it was just _perfect_ for such a sophisticated, modern woman. Hye-won was American, after all, and Korean traditions didn’t really bait her. He asked her during a formal dinner, in a fancy restaurant, with champagne. She said no. He asked why. She answered _Oh, dear. If you need me to tell you, then it’s better that you never find out._ Kyungsoo told her that it was just plain mean (Hye-won didn’t have anything to say to that). One year after, though, he was grateful for her sad expression and muted reaction. He understood the word that she couldn’t bring herself to say.

Hye-won told everyone that they had broken up because of something that she did. Kyungsoo could’ve said the truth, but then of course he didn’t. In the end, she left like everyone else. Just a shadow in the horizon until she became even less than that.

This happened four years before that June when Baekhyun kissed him.

They were under the roof of a supermarket, waiting for the dreadful rain to stop a little bit so they could take a run for it in the general direction of the closest subway station. Kyungsoo was holding a plastic bag with soda and a small magazine full of crosswords. They were in the vicinity, for a reason or another. So Kyungsoo asked if they could stop and buy something to drink. Baekhyun asked why they couldn’t just stop at a café or diner anywhere. Kyungsoo told him, then, full of dignity, _If you can’t see the merits of buying the exact same thing but cheaper then I don’t really know what else to tell you._ Baekhyun smiled — he always thought that Kyungsoo was funny to death, which was as much a delusion as it was a compliment.

“Do you think it’s going to stop soon?” Baekhyun asked him after a while. They were in silence, the cold of the soda against Kyungsoo’s exposed arms being the only relevant thing that he was paying attention to. The flow of people had died out after fifteen minutes, everyone safe on the leather seat of their cars. It was almost like a desert planet, just Baekhyun and him waiting for the sky to stop crying over them.

“I don’t know. It should, right? It’s June.”

Baekhyun nodded. “We should carry an umbrella. Do you think there’s one to sell here?”

“You can ask.” Kyungsoo told him. “It can’t hurt.”

Baekhyun went back inside, where he spent ten minutes. Kyungsoo was too worried about his cellphone, that would probably drown if he left, but that didn’t really have a solution since Kyungsoo was soaked anyway.

“I bought some.” Baekhyun said, waving two neon-orange umbrellas. They looked weird, because the color was so bright, but Kyungsoo was _so glad_ that he had thought of buying two, and not only one — which would be _terribly_ uncomfortable, no matter how cute it looked from the outside — that he fell in love with that shade of orange immediately.

“Thank _God.”_ he said, and Baekhyun grinned. He was always smiling, Kyungsoo noticed. It was like he was trying to compensate all his faults using a crazy amount of charm. Kyungsoo, well. He couldn’t judge — if he was charismatic then he would do this exact thing. It’s the same with absurdly beautiful people, or crazy smart ones. You pick this amazing quality and then shape it in a way that it’s everything people can see when they look at you. It’s clever, and effective. Kyungsoo wished he could do something like that.

They walked under the rain for a while and it wasn’t nice, and it wasn’t romantic. Baekhyun’s shoes were doing this really weird sound because of the water, and Kyungsoo was soaked and anxious about his phone. He didn’t have money to pay to fix it. He would just drop it in raw rice and pray for the best.

“Can I kiss you?” Baekhyun asked, out of nowhere. He looked straight at Kyungsoo, who had stopped and was just standing there, under the neon-orange umbrella. A minute went by, and Baekhyun still hadn’t taken it back. There was something really brave about it that made Kyungsoo remember that this man went to the streets night after night to try to save people.

“You can.” Kyungsoo told him. “But you will have to go here under my umbrella, because I can’t handle rain right now. I’m worried about my phone.”

“It’s okay”, Baekhyun answered him. “I like you anyway.”

And that was that.

 

* * *

 

“We should stop meeting like this.” Baekhyun said from behind the glass. He was wearing the Spiderman suit — it was a really ugly shade of red.  

Kyungsoo dragged him inside in less than fifteen seconds, locking the window behind him. He wanted to throw something at Baekhyun; maybe a vase or a shoe. Something that would hurt, like a television or a table. “What are you _doing?”_

“Coming back home!” he answered, like it was obvious. “I mean, not _yours._ Like, in an abstract sense of the word.”

“Yeah, yeah”, Kyungsoo murmured, patting Baekhyun’s sides for injuries. He was particularly interested in checking the ribs. Baekhyun was always bruising it in some new, dumber way every night — he thought that he could get away with shit like that, because he allegedly had fast healing. Kyungsoo told him that if that was true, then he could just prove it. Baekhyun asked, _How can I possibly prove that?,_ sounding upset. After a while he went like, _Oh. I see what you did here._

“I helped to save a kitten today.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“It was in the roof!”

“Again: in the middle of the night?”

“It was an adventurous kitten.” Baekhyun told him, condescending. “You wouldn’t understand the appeal of the outdoors.”

“Countryside is for idiots.”

“Well, _I’m_ not an idiot.”

“Yeah, keep thinking that. You should go take a shower; it’s freezing out there.”

“I don’t want to go to my apartment right now.”

Kyungsoo sighed, long suffering. “What did you do this time?”

“I broke a vase, but it wasn’t _my fault._ It was just… there. When I got back from, you know. The streets.”

“Is that what we are calling illegal vigilante behavior these days?”

“I know you don’t like it.” Baekhyun said, very quiet.

“I think it’s dangerous.”

“You think it’s useless.”

“That too.” Kyungsoo smiled a little, then, because he hated seeing Baekhyun looking so defeated. It was like someone had killed his dog and then his cat. “I’m going to your apartment get some clean clothes. Go take a shower, your hands are freezing and I won’t let you touch me with them.”

Baekhyun laughed a little, his unhappy expression loosing up into something less grim. “Thank you, Kyungsoo. You’re too good for me.”

Kyungsoo wanted to answer _I’m really not._ He also could say _You’re the best one of us and deserves someone better than me._ He wanted to tell Baekhyun a lot of things, secret things, words that he couldn’t say before. But, of course, he didn’t. He just smiled and closed the door behind him.

Maybe one day, though. It was looking like they would be doing this for a long, long time.

(And that was exactly how Kyungsoo wanted it to be).


End file.
